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Caeia March (1948-*)

Caeia March was born in the Isle of Man in 1946, and she grew up in industrial South Yorkshire. March attended University in London, and in 1968 she graduated in Social Sciences. She got married in the same year and subsequently had two sons. In 1980, she left her husband and began living as a lesbian, and she supported herself by teaching in adult education and conducting writing classes for women. In 1990, March settled in Cornwall where she co-founded the West Cornwall Women's Land Trust, which is a tree-planting and conservation project for women. March is best known for her lesbian feminist novels Three Ply Yarn (1986); The Hide and Seek Files (1989); Fire! Fire! (1991); Reflections (1995); Between the Worlds (1996); and Spinsters' Rock (1999). A feature of March’s novels is that her characters sometimes inhabit more than one novel, for example, Lleryn, a young lesbian and a minor character in The Hide and Seek Files, makes another appearance and takes a more central role in Between the Worlds, where she is somewhat older and wiser. This extension of one character’s individual story reflects an important aspect of March’s fiction where she is concerned with the continuum of lesbian identity and experience. All her novels generally have a wide ranging chronological structure that often spans more than one century, and this not only serves to highlight the historical presence of lesbians, but also illustrates how lesbian sexuality is often constrained by the power structures in which women live. In all of her novels, March’s lesbian protagonists are subject to discrimination and persecution which often prevents them from fulfilling their lesbian desires, living their lives as lesbians, or even accepting their lesbian identities in the first place. The idea that sexuality is shaped and constrained by power structures is in keeping with Sigmund Freud’s idea that sexuality is a process independent of an individual’s sex. He argued that the direction sexual desire takes has no necessary relationship to inherited sexual characteristics. Instead, he theorised that all children are born polymorphously perverse - their sexual desires can be drawn towards any object - and it is their childhood experiences that cause their sex drive to be directed towards members of the opposite sex. In my readings of March’s novels I highlight the work of various feminist theorists who have appropriated and developed Freud’s ideas to similarly contend that sexual desire is socially constructed. As such lesbianism can be perceived as a natural and not a pathological condition, as it has in been labelled in the past. The application of the ideas of critical theorists gives deeper insight and understanding into the problems lesbian’s experience, and also how their problems may be overcome.

March’s first two novels were published in the 1980s, and this is significant because at the time there was a resurgence of institutionalised homophobia. In some respects was due to the spread of AIDS, but, as I argue, it can also be related to the economic recession. Although not overtly political in condemnation of the Government March’s narratives do make the occasional disparaging remark towards the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and specifically draw attention to several of her more infamous policies and their devastating social effects. For example: Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988) which prohibited the promotion or teaching of homosexuality in schools; the pit closures, which led to the miners strike in 1984-5; and the cuts in welfare benefits, which made the lives of poor single-parents even harder. All of this places March’s work unmistakeably in its specific socio-historical context of the 1980s. However, March’s narratives are by no means confined to the events of this decade as her interest in women’s history is far-reaching, and encapsulates the experiences of women from a variety of bygone eras and cultures, such as the persecution of the German Beguines in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the European witch trials of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the militant activities of working-class suffragettes and female trade unionists in Britain in the early twentieth century. In her later novels her attention turns to female manifestations in Cornish folk law and mythology - all of which reflects the feminist practice of the reclamation of ‘herstory’ where history is rewritten from a female perspective and emphasises the role of women.

An important aspect of my inclusion of March is her specificity as a working-class lesbian who writes about working-class lesbians. The brief preface to The Hide and Seek Files tells the reader that March was ‘born of white working-class parents’, and this indicates that March considers her working-class roots to be a significant part of her identity. However, since embarking on this project I have discovered that March’s claim to be working class is somewhat dubious as her father was a Methodist minister, and her upbringing apparently did not suffer from the deprivation that is characteristic of so many working-class childhoods. Being of working-class origin brings with it many negative connotations, particularly if you are a woman writer attempting to break into the literary world, so it is perhaps quite surprising that anyone should not only readily admit to being of working-class origin but virtually advertise the fact to the reader before they even embark on reading the novel. However, evidence suggests that March is an educated person, and was familiar with the ideas that were prevalent in the Women’s Movement and lesbian feminist theory at the time she was writing, so I think it is safe to assume that her appropriation of a working-class identity is a political one. Also, the fact that her novels encapsulate the experiences of women from a diverse range of marginalized groups, in that her characters consist of lesbians, working-class women and black women illustrates that she is making a concerted effort to embrace the many facets of women’s oppression. When this is taken into account, March’s perhaps fraudulent claim to be working class can be appreciated, and perhaps commended.